May Contain Traces of Magic (10 page)

‘Hang on,' he interrupted, ‘we sell stuff like that. LY42V, Evil-Off anti-demon talismans. Very good line, we do a lot of them, especially around the Walsall area—'

Jill giggled. ‘Sorry,' she said, ‘but they're a bit of a standing joke in the department.'

‘Oh.' Chris scowled. ‘They don't work, then.'

‘Well, yes and no,' she replied. ‘Actually they're a pretty effective defence against female Grade 6 servitor demons - that's basically cooks, laundry and clerical staff, which to be honest with you aren't that much of a problem since they almost never show up in the material world, unless they're really hungry and desperate. So essentially your talisman things are a bit like an umbrella one inch square, keeps off some of the rain but not most of it. Though,' she went on, ‘I suppose if you had a lot of them, twenty or thirty—'

‘Car stock,' he said excitedly. ‘It's one of the lines where I carry a couple of dozen in the car, so if a customer needs stock in a hurry I can supply them on the spot.'

‘Ah.' Jill looked interested. ‘In which case—'

‘Except,' he said suddenly remembering, ‘I sold the whole lot to Paul at the Magic Shack this morning, just before it happened. So it couldn't have been that, could it?'

Sigh. ‘Not really, no. Oh well,' she said, ‘if it wasn't that, it must've been something else. We'll check out everything you've got in the car - don't look at me like that, it's not my fault. I'll see if I can arrange a car you can borrow till we've finished with yours, how'd that be?'

‘Thanks,' Chris said, a trifle grudgingly. ‘But all my samples—'

‘Sorry.' Jill shook her head. ‘Get them back to you as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I'd say you've got an ironclad excuse for taking the rest of the day off. Now that can't be bad, can it?'

She had a point there, to be sure. ‘You couldn't possibly ring my boss, could you?' Chris said. ‘Tell him it's a matter of national security and all that. Otherwise he'll be on at me for skiving.'

‘No trouble,' Jill replied, with a grin. ‘In fact, I could say we'll be needing you on call for the next twenty-four hours so you can't possibly go back to work till after the weekend. All right?'

Chris nodded solemnly. ‘I always knew you'd come in useful for something one of these days,' he replied.

The car she got for him was a big black BMW, with cruise control, a radio like something from NASA and (Chris discovered joyfully as he scrabbled about in the boot) one of those magnetic sirens you can slap on the roof, like in the cop shows. He couldn't quite bring himself to use it, though, and when he tried to turn on the radio an extremely snotty voice asked him for his security access code, and said some really quite hurtful things when he said he hadn't got one. The cruise control had him zooming down the motorway at a hundred and ten miles an hour, until he finally managed to turn the bloody thing off.

The clothes were an improvement, too. Jill had coerced one of the Day-Glo men into lending him some in return for his own, which had been sealed in plastic bags, tagged and packed in a massive steel lead-lined trunk. The replacements fitted better than his own, and the polo shirt had a little goblin embroidered on the pocket, over a crest and the letters DS. Chris had an idea he'd seen it before somewhere; a bit later, he remembered that some of Jill's stuff had the same logo, so it was probably some kind of designer something. He speculated briefly about neglecting to give it back when his own clothes were returned, but accepted fatalistically that he wouldn't get away with it.

The rest of the day was his own; strange and unfamiliar concept. He couldn't remember offhand when he'd last had a day of his very own. Days belonged to work, apart from holidays and weekends, which belonged to Karen and were spent shopping for and assembling flat-pack chipboard furniture and visiting her loathsome relatives. The best part of half a day all to himself, to spend as he chose; with the added bonus of needle-sharp designer clothes and a big fast black car filled with the government's petrol. It was almost as though God had given him a gift voucher for his birthday.

Yes, Chris thought, as he drove, but what am I going to do with it? Go home? No way - I can go home any time. All right, then, I can drive somewhere, which is what I do all day every day for work. Or I can drive home, park the car and spend the afternoon in a pub . . .

(Cautionary tale widely repeated by the JWW Retail reps; about a customer who bought a JWW Sheer Genieus djinn-in-a-bottle. Three days later he lurched back into the shop looking haggard and miserable, demanding his money back. Why, asked the girl behind the till, what's wrong with it? Bloody thing told me I could have three wishes, the customer replied, and I've spent the last three days trying to decide, and there's
absolutely nothing I want
. Except (the customer added) my money back—)

He pulled in at a Little Chef, ordered the Alabama Sunrise jacket potato and chips, and stared out of the window for a while, watching the cars queuing for petrol. The terror had worn off, but there was still a residual ache, like a bruise, where it had been. Demons, he thought; there really are such things as demons, they're out there wandering around, invisible, and they
eat
people. Not the most cheerful of thoughts.

The Alabama Sunrise arrived: medium-sized industrial potato with a bit of cheese melted in it, and a few bits of leaf scattered round the edge, plus a small mountain of chips. Chris stabbed the fork against the potato's dense hide and felt the tines bend.

Then a thought struck him, so dreadful that he nearly choked.
SatNav!

Strip the car down to the sub-atomic level, the Day-Glo jerk had said. Even if he'd been exaggerating somewhat, it was more or less inevitable that they'd stick a screwdriver into her casing and prise her open; and then what? Would she survive? How did this imprisoning thing work, anyway? Could they take her out, peer about inside the casing for very small demons, then put her back again, good as new? Somehow he doubted that. Not government thinking. Their attitude was likely to be more along the lines of smash it open with a hammer, zap anything inside, chuck the remains in the skip and if they want to try claiming compensation for damaged property, bloody good luck to them.

No way, he said to himself; got to save her before it's too late. With an effort he elbowed a path through the panic in his mind and tried to think what to do. Jill, of course; she was the boss, she could stop them. And she would, he knew, provided he gave her a half-sensible reason—

‘Excuse me,' said the waitress, ‘but do you know you're eating your tie?'

Which was perfectly true. ‘Sorry,' Chris said, once he'd fished it out of his mouth. ‘I was miles away. You see, the government's taken my SatNav, because of the demon, and they're going to kill her unless I stop them—'

Hearing it out loud, together with the stuffed expression on the waitress's face, had a sobering effect on him; a bit like jumping into a nice hot bath, only to find that someone forgot to turn on the immersion heater. ‘Only joking,' he said cheerfully. ‘Can I have some more coffee, please?'

Probably, Chris told himself (the waitress was looking back at him over her shoulder, presumably in case she was called on to be a witness at some point in the future), it was just as well. In the back of his mind he could hear Ben Jarrow's soft, bleating voice: can sometimes be a bit of an unhealthy influence, you'd do well to be on the lookout for warning signs. Could it really be happening to him? he wondered; not a comfortable thought. But now it seemed like the Day-Glo crowd had solved the problem for him: no more SatNav, no more unhealthy influence. He'd miss her, of course, but if he really was falling under the spell of some kind of malign power . . . Not that he could bring himself to believe it, but presumably that was how all the victims felt. In which case, he owed Jill and her brightly coloured staff a vote of thanks. Which would be worse, he speculated, being possessed by a dark spirit or eaten by a demon? Both, he decided.

The more Chris thought about it, the dodgier his recent behaviour seemed to be. Now he came to think of it, he'd actually talked to the horrible machine; worse still, it had talked back to him. Funny how he hadn't really remembered it before. It had been like a dream, a wispy vague memory that seeps away as you wake up, and half an hour later you can't recall a single detail. That, surely, was suspicious in itself, implying that the critter in the plastic box was deliberately covering its tracks by doing things to his memory.

The thought made him shudder so much that he spilt coffee on his knee. Now, though, it was as though the spell had shattered, and he could hear himself talking,
chatting
with the thing, asking its advice about how to handle the difficult shop managers, moaning to it about the trainee. Even by the fairly relaxed standards of the retail sorcery trade, that was pretty odd behaviour, a man his age with an imaginary friend. More than that: an imaginary friend with a criminal record, currently doing life for some particularly nasty crime. And maybe - this one made him wince so hard that he nearly knocked over the table - maybe SatNav had something to do with the fact that he couldn't seem to go more than five miles these days without tripping over demons. After all, if she was a criminal (murder? necromancy?) there was at least a possibility that she was plotting her escape with the demons - while you're ripping him limb from limb, if you could possibly see your way to cracking open my plastic box, I could just slip away in the confusion and everybody'll assume I got broken by accident, and they won't come after me—

No, even now that the spell was broken Chris couldn't make himself credit that. Except, of course, that the last thing the demon did before kicking open the door and bolting had been to lean across him and do something with SatNav's controls. At the time he'd been sure it had switched her off, but maybe he'd got that wrong. He cursed himself for being too chicken to tell Jill about that. It was going to be embarrassing when he spoke to her next and filled in the missing details, which he now knew he had a duty to do since it could possibly explain everything. And, even more important, there was something that SatNav herself had said, he was convinced of it, though he couldn't actually bring to mind what the exact words had been.

He gobbled down the rest of his chips, paid the bill and hurried back to the car. Quick check to make sure there weren't any demons hiding under the road atlas on the back seat, and he set off for home. But with a detour: he stopped off at Enchanted Worlds in Nuneaton, where he was fairly sure they quite liked him, and asked to see a copy of
The Book Of All Human Knowledge
.

‘It's a random quality-control check,' he said, and he could see they were impressed. ‘We've been getting reports of defective stock, so naturally—'

‘We haven't had any problems,' the girl said. ‘Well, apart from the thickies who don't read the instructions, but that's the public for you, we just tell them to—'

Chris gave her a big buttery smile and waffled for a minute or so about proactive customer support being the backbone of inclusive retailing, and she brought him a copy of the
Book
. He thanked her and asked if he could take it through into the staffroom for a few minutes. No problem, she said. She even made him a coffee.

The
Book
, as so many customers had pointed out, had no index; no need for one, since the
Book
knew better than you did what you really needed to know. But, for professional-grade users, there was a hidden way in: you folded back the corner of the copyright page, and a menu dropped down. Press
show hidden
with your thumbnail, and you got a list of options, including
Index
—

Chris scrolled down to
demons
, selected that, scrolled down further to
killing
and prodded the word with the pad of his index finger. The page went blank, apart from the universally loathed little black hourglass, then filled with print.

Chris frowned, and touched
pantacopt
with his finger. The page cleared, the revolting little hourglass twirled, and then a small box appeared asking him for his user name and password. But that was all right; he knew the universal key.

He cleared his throat. ‘Seven nine seven one A-square standard, ' he said. The box vanished, and was replaced by—